Imagine somebody who loves mangoes standing in front of an apple tree. They stand there and talk about how wonderful a mango is, its colour, its sweetness, the way it smells in the heat of the afternoon. They come back the next day and do it again, and the day after that. They do it for years, patiently, with real feeling, because they genuinely love mangoes and they genuinely want one from this particular tree.
Nothing happens. Of course nothing happens. The tree gives apples, it has never given anything else, and no quantity of description of a mango is going to change what it is. The person becomes disappointed first, then bitter, and eventually decides that there is something wrong with this tree, something withholding or ungenerous about it. That much is obvious when it is a tree and anybody can see it.
It is not obvious at all when it is a person, and we do it constantly, for decades, and we call it love. We call it having standards. We call it wanting the best for somebody. And the whole time we are standing in front of an apple tree, describing a mango, and becoming steadily more disappointed that the world will not rearrange itself.
What it does to the tree
Now consider the other side of it, which takes far longer to see and is usually only seen by people who have been on that side themselves. Suppose the apple tree could feel. It has somebody standing in front of it every single day describing something it can never produce, in loving detail, with obvious longing. It cannot give what is wanted, and it can hear very clearly that what it does give is not the thing.
What would that tree feel? Not resentment. Something worse and quieter. It would spend its entire life feeling that it was a lesser tree. An apple is a whole and complete thing, and there is nothing insufficient about it, but the apple tree would never once experience it that way, because there was always somebody there, kindly, lovingly, describing a mango.
Most of us have been on both sides of this. We have stood in front of people describing mangoes for years without ever once hearing ourselves. And we have been the tree, giving apples wholeheartedly to somebody who wanted something else, and slowly coming to believe that what we had to offer was not very much. Neither position is comfortable and both of them can last a lifetime.
Both of them are unaware
Here is what is most difficult about the whole arrangement. Neither person is behaving badly. The one who wants a mango is not a villain, and is not being unreasonable in wanting what they want, because they love mangoes and that is not a crime. And the tree is not withholding anything at all. It is giving fully, everything it has, every season, without any reservation.
And yet between two people who mean each other no harm whatsoever, a great deal of misery is produced, year after year. He feels perpetually let down. She feels perpetually insufficient. Both of them believe the problem is the other one, and both of them are wrong, and neither can see it because the whole thing is happening well below the level either of them ever examines.
What is actually wrong is the arrangement itself. Somebody has come to a place that cannot give them what they need, and has decided to stay there and want it anyway, and has never once asked why they came here for mangoes in the first place. That question is available at any moment and it is almost never asked, because asking it moves the difficulty from the other person to oneself.
If you want mangoes, go to the mango tree
The simplest thing in the world would be to go to a mango tree. There nobody needs to expect anything. There is no hoping, no hinting, no explaining, no waiting, no being let down. Mangoes arrive because that is what is there, and no expectation is required at any point in the transaction.
Which tells us something important. Expectation only exists where there is a mismatch between what is being asked for and what is actually in front of us. Which means expectation is not really about the other person at all. It is information about ourselves, and it says that we are seeking something in a place that does not have it, and that we have not yet been honest about either half of that sentence.
And when the tree becomes aware of what it actually is, something else changes as well. Then it does not matter what anybody stands in front of it wanting, because an apple is complete and was never a failed mango. The whole misery required the tree to be unaware of itself, and once that goes, the standing and describing simply becomes somebody else's confusion happening nearby. Many people try instead to have attachments without expectations, which sounds very wise and turns out to be impossible. What can be done is smaller: to notice, earlier than before, when the describing of mangoes has begun.
